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The Yellow King
Throughout human history, there have been things in the shadows that have observed the progress of a fledgling species. Those that deign to look upon the works of the human race do so with disdain, and fewer still condescend to have a hand in our affairs. These few are enough to undo everything. However, mankind is not so easily pushed aside. Some individuals, be they lucky, brave or just ignorant, stand in the way of the eldritch horrors that lurk beyond time, space and reason. Some are filmmakers, some are soldiers, some are simply bystanders, whereas some are part of the United States Government conspiracy code-named: Delta Green. These are their stories. The Meerut Massacre - 1857 The Meerut rebellion of 1857 was sparked by something much darker than the history books tell us. A contingent of disgraced Army officers from the 11th Hussars. A terrified local populace. And an eccentric administrator of the East India Company. All conspired to ignite a declaration of indignation and brutality- the only sane response to an unimaginable violation. Characters: * Lieutenant George Kiff * Lieutenant Richard Hagan * Lieutenant Norbert "Nob" van der Cock * Captain Robert Raleigh The Hollywood Horror - 1937 Hollywood, Los Angeles, 1937- a tinsel lining for a modern city on the make. Talkies draw in crowds that number into the thousands at cinemas across the city. New talent floods into the metropolis each day and night. Behind the gloss and the glamour though, the City of Angels has already accumulated its fair share of broken individuals. Fortunes have been lost, promising careers have been snuffed out and the dark dust filled days of the Great Depression are an all too recent memory. For many, those days are not a memory at all but rather still a constant reality. As bright as the lights of Hollywood shine, they can’t burn away the sandy plains that smother everything that surrounds L.A. In the midst of it all a former prodigy has taken his own life. An eccentric German director by the name of Otto Wolfgang has marked a permanent end to his own floundering career at the end of a rope. Hailed as an expressionist genius upon his arrival in the United States over a decade ago, his status in Hollywood died off with the introduction of pictures with sound. In the years since he had lived as a recluse- occasionally emerging into the scathing gaze of the public eye to announce that his work continued. Now, with his death, he has left a convoluted and not all together legible will that nevertheless makes one point clear. He has bequeathed his not inconsiderable estate to a group of ragtag Hollywood B-Listers on one condition: that they finish and release his masterpiece. Characters: * Campbell Kearins * Tim Ribkins * Delphine du Croix, aka 'Odile' A washed up, used up former actress as well as, for a time, Otto Wolfgang's number one starlet and mistress- now reduced to singing torch songs in dingy L.A. nightclubs. What scraps of her once illustrious career remain are quickly fading away in the bleached white heat of the California sun. * Christoph Zeiten A former proud fixture on the silent film circuit, his career was ended by the introduction of pictures with sound. His lifetime speech impediment made sure that the transition from old to new was untenable. Now, he stalks the backlots of Hollywood, trading on his increasingly irrelevant name. The Zamorozhennyye Shariki Incidents - 1945 Zamorozhennyye Shariki, Pechengsky District, Murmansk Oblast, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, 15th January 1945. The Continuation War was something of a strange distraction from the wider hostilities taking place in Europe at this time against the blight of fascism and the threat it posed to our great Soviet dream. As Comrade's Konev and Vatutin retook Ukraine for the motherland, many Soviet soldiers fought and died in the cold winter of the Arctic Circle against another fascist foe, the Finnish. Backed by the Nazis in Berlin, Finland had never pledged its loyalties formally to any side of the conflict, and over the course of a grueling three year conflict we were able to win victory over them, gaining much territory in the far northwest and ensuring our ability to support communist forces within the country to spread global revolution into Scandinavia. By late 1944, the war was over, but some small pockets of Soviet forces were left behind to dig in for another freezing winter in the Murmank Oblast, to maintain a presence in the new Pechengsky District and to ensure there would be no counterattack by disaffected Finnish partisans, or the indigenous Sami people, for whom the region had been home for centuries. The Finns were a wily race, they knew the winter better even than we, they knew the land and the territory and the Sami, well they were something else entirely. The incidents which took place at Zamorozhennyye Shariki Outpost, situated between the new Finnish and Norwegian borders, in the height of the winter of 1945, was of particular note during this time, although records still remain highly classified. - Commissar Alexei Mikhailovich Darkin, writing in 1962. Delta Green - 1970's 1977. Las Vegas is flourishing. Amidst a sea of sand a thousand lights shine along with the dreams of just as many gamblers. Outside of the city limits the desert buries everything else. State Patrol cars glide back and forth over a highway that doesn’t take notice of any of it. Out in the Mojave desert there are a hundred or so graves that do the same. But then something happens that makes everyone takes notice. Sam Gandolfi is shot dead outside of the ‘Triple H’ Casino. Somebody, the LVPD don’t know who, took the time to hack his left arm off. Six hour later the California State Patrol find a seemingly discarded arm on Interstate 15. What was a simple murder is now a federal crime. A crack team of FBI investigators is called in. Characters: * Stockton Hunter * Randall Bukowski * Vladimir Trotsky-Lenin * Richard "Dick" van der Cock * Enoch Farrier * Reece D'Eau Delta Vice - 1980's Altered by their experiences in Las Vegas, the Midwest and Baltimore, the the agents of Delta Green have since drifted apart. All but abandoned by Delta Green- itself fractured and in turmoil after continued persecution by enemies within and without- each man has dealt with their shared past in their own way. Whether through coincidence or something more insidious each has washed ashore in Florida. Specifically, the cocaine dusted and blood soaked beaches of Miami. They have tried to live as best as they could with the knowledge that things that man was not meant to know stalk the dark corners of the earth. Some have tried to forget. Others have forced themselves to remember. Now, in 1987, all are called upon once more by Delta Green. Each has been invited to one last night at the opera. The Foundation - 1989-1998 Endwar - 2002